Nearly two centuries ago, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk interested in mathematics and botany, noticed that pollen taken from a sweet pea plant with red flowers and used to fertilize another sweet pea plant with red flowers occasionally produced seeds that yielded sweet pea plants with white flowers. He was convinced that he had stumbled upon one of Mother Nature’s greatest tricks and spent years working out the mechanisms by which this could occur. He discovered the basic elements of what would eventually be called genetics, but none of his contemporaries recognized or appreciated what he had discovered. He published his landmark observations in a paper entitled Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (“Experiments on Plant Hybridization”) in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, where it lay unnoticed until decades after Brother Mendel died.
The chemistry responsible for Mendel’s observations was identified in the twentieth century and the investigation and manipulation of what we now refer to as the genetic codes of all living things has proceeded with ever increasing speed. The principal chemicals containing the blueprints of life are DNA and,RNA. Everything that has ever lived, from obscure germs to massive sea monsters, appears to have relied upon these same chemicals to build and operate the machinery of life.
Most of the animals and plants that have lived on our planet are no longer active or evident. Climate changes, meteor impacts, volcanic activity, human intervention, diseases, and factors yet to be identified led to the extinction of many of the species aboard our blue planet. Evidence of many of the larger plants and animals has been preserved in fossils. Some of the simplest organic material, such as viruses, is still with us and exists in a state of suspended animation in the permafrost of the arctic.
Viruses are packets of genetic information that can be transferred from one cell or organism to another. They are not strictly speaking life forms since their existence and perpetuation is almost entirely dependent upon the machinery in the cells or organisms they infect. Their multiplication and dissemination routinely kill or permanently modify the cells they infect. Many viruses change in a variety of ways as they move through a target population. The multiple strains of Covid-19 that have emerged over the past four years have made this phenomenon familiar to the human population targeted by this virus. Over the millennia, trillions of viruses have emerged and many of them have been locked away in the arctic permafrost until now.
Virologists are exploring the frozen tundra for long inactive viruses that infected animals tens of thousands of years ago. Although these genetic messenger packets were never actually ‘alive’ in the strict sense of the term, they have been labelled ‘zombie viruses’ because they are being retrieved from their frozen ‘graves’ and are being used to infect modern organisms. The hope is that exploring the properties of these long lost viruses and mapping their genetic codes will lead to medical advances. Concerns that resurrecting these infectious agents may spawn new epidemics are tempered by the recognition that planet warming is melting much of the permafrost and oil and gas exploration and retrieval in the arctic will inevitably disturb these viruses as well. It is obviously better to know these viruses before they become widely disseminated than to wait for the ‘zombie apocalypse.’
A hypothetical application of the gene manipulation available with modern technology is the resurrection of extinct species. Although we do not have the tools to repopulate the planet with dinosaurs, we theoretically can retrieve enough of the genetic material from animals that became extinct within the past century to produce animals similar to these ancestors. The Tasmanian tiger, a dog-like marsupial that was hunted to extinction in Australia several decades ago, has been nominated for this exercise in reincarnation because of the quality of this animal’s genetic material available in museum specimens. If this reanimation is successful, biologists may try repopulating the northern latitudes with woolly mammoths.
This may all sound improbable, but who could have conceived of safely destroying deadly bacteria with chemicals [antibiotics] produced by fungi? Who would have thought that chemical warfare agents might be useful as chemotherapy in treating leukemia? These were accidental discoveries made by observant people. The study of zombie viruses and the reanimation of extinct species may sound dangerous and unlikely to be useful, but these scientific exercises inform us. More knowledge is invariably useful. How we apply that knowledge is what determines whether we improve our lot or annihilate ourselves.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
